“She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, “She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones.”

This is Haya Tedeschi who, at the beginning of the novel, is an old Jewish woman sitting in a rocking chair in the Italian town of Gorizia, near Trieste. She is surrounded by documents, photographs, cuttings. Her head is swarming with memories, “melting in her mind like chocolate”.

It should be remembered that Trieste was one of those places which was a disputed territory in both world wars. A kind of no-man’s land perennially awaiting the outcome of some new military action. Its inhabitants never quite sure of where they belonged, pressed in by borders that were continually shifting around them. In short, it’s an inspired place to set a novel about the horrors of world war two.

Haya’s story is constructed piece by piece with frequent brilliantly researched documentary interludes. The artistry with which this novel moves back and forth between the personal and the public, a microcosm and a macrocosm of the Holocaust is, for the most part, brilliant. Haya’s story is told with a kind of disarming playful lyricism at times which reminded me of Nicole Krauss but without Krauss’ whimsy, her artificial sweeteners (which I enjoy) . We learn about Haya’s family’s displacement during the first world war. We learn that, like most Italian Jews, they are integrated into Italian life and do not identify themselves primarily as Jewish. To outsiders they are essentially indistinguishable from any other local resident. We see how they are forced by events to become nomads. Work takes them to Albania, Milan, Naples, Venice and Trieste. The hub of the novel is Haya’s relationship with a seemingly and, relatively speaking, innocent German soldier who is also a keen photographer. Haya is a typical young girl. Wilfully ignorant. While transports are leaving Trieste in the middle of the night she is often to be found at the cinema or dining in a trattoria. (Drndic is very tough on Haya and her family: “The Tedeschi family are a civilian family, bystanders who keep their mouths shut, but when they do speak, they sign up to fascism. For 60 years now these blind observers have been pounding their chests and shouting we are innocent because we didn’t know!…these yes men, these enablers of evil.”) Kurt Franz, the German boyfriend, leaves her when she is pregnant. A year later her son mysteriously vanishes when her back is turned. The central mystery of the novel is what happened to her son. The personal horror of the novel is the gradual unfurling of who his father was, what he did.

There’s a sense we’ve become a little immunised to the horrors of the Holocaust. This novel rips through all those palliatives. It adds new horrors to the Holocaust. Some of the things you learn are as disturbing as anything you already know. I won’t spill any beans because these details are very much an integral part of the novel’s emotional charge. You also learn a few more light-hearted facts like, for example, how when Mussolini’s Ministry of Culture clamped down on the infiltration of foreign words into the Italian language they forbade Italians to refer to Louis Armstrong by his American name; instead he had to be called Luigi Braccioforte! More unsettling we discover that the Swiss allowed the transport trains to pass through their territory when the Brenner tunnel was snowed up on the provision that the Red Cross be allowed to serve the prisoners hot soup and coffee.

I read some of the other reviews of this and noticed one person objected to the Nuremburg transcriptions and especially the list of the 9,000 Jews deported from Italy. I found this list very moving because you knew every one of those people had a deeply moving human story like Haya’s. And you don’t have to read every name on the list so this seemed a rather querulous complaint. There might be a case for complaining that, at times, the documentary dwarfed the human story of Haya; that perhaps one didn’t quite get to know Haya as much as one would have liked and occasionally the large scale narrative detracted rather than added to the momentum of the small scale narrative. Personally, for example, I found the quoting of Pound, Borges, Shakespeare, Eliot and others clumsy rather than illuminating. But this is a small misgiving.

There’s also a fabulous twist when, late in the novel, we learn who is narrating the novel. This is without question one of the most painful novels I’ve ever read. It’s no Schindler’s List, softening the horror with acts of moving kindness. There’s nothing uplifting about this narrative - except the artistry with which it’s constructed.

I’ve never read a series before. Finally I understand why people sleep outside bookstores the day before the next instalment is due to be published. WI’ve never read a series before. Finally I understand why people sleep outside bookstores the day before the next instalment is due to be published. Were there to be a book five I might well zipper myself inside a bag outside Feltrinelli the night before release. Except there will be no next instalment here. I’m done. Lila has left my life and I will never know anything more about her. I feel horribly bereft.

Book Four has less of a feel of fictional memoir about it; it reads more like a novel. It contains some clever post-modernist tricks, most notably the book within a book theme. Elena Greco finally writes about Lila, except it isn’t these books (these books play no part whatsoever in her story); it’s a seventy page novella called Friendship. Meanwhile she has the suspicion that Lila is writing secretly about Naples. In spirit, these have always been Lila’s books. Now Elena lets slip the possibility that maybe they really are Lila’s books. Vanity is probably the central theme of this book but authorship is also a prevailing theme. Ferrante asks many probing questions about the nature of authorship. And we end up asking, who is the author of the Neapolitan series?

Elena becomes rather more disagreeable in this book. She becomes vain and a bit petty. Especially in contrast to Lila, who seems to live without any recourse to vanity, which is why perhaps she’s such a compelling and deeply fascinating character. The only other author I can recall who attempted to create a character free of vanity was Dostoevsky with The Idiot and, brilliant as that was, I'd have to say Ferrante did a better job than he did. It began to bother me how disagreeable I was finding Elena and her vanity. I wasn’t at all sure this was what Ferrante intended. Then I realised that what Ferrante intended was probably exactly the confusion I was feeling. This isn’t one of those run of the mill novels where every character is morally and emotionally consistent and so has a clearly designated and manipulative charge and endgame. It’s a novel that constantly springs surprises, that constantly makes you stop and question lazy emotional and moral assumptions you realise you harbour. One thing Ferrante does so well is get at the anatomy of every strong emotion. Emotions aren’t single and straightforward. Every emotion carries the charge of its opposite. Emotion in fact is often us arguing with ourselves. She shows how hate can be simultaneously present with love, jealousy with aspiration, admiration with resentment, conviction with doubt. I don't think any writer has done arguing better than Ferrante. You could say the books are one protracted argument – everyone is constantly arguing, romantically, domestically, politically, socially - and you come to realise that this what life is, a long protracted messy argument. Lila is almost like some magical touchstone creature. Even when she appears to be wrong she turns out to be right. I don’t think she’s wrong once in the entire novel and yet she’s far from some simplistic Obi Wan Kenobi; she’s hugely complex, volatile, divisive, contradictory, spontaneous, calculated, adorable, obnoxious. She bristles with lived life on every page. In contrast, the more of Elena’s vanity we see the more we doubt that Elena Greco could have written these novels. You begin to feel only Lila could have.

For me Lila is up there with Anna Karenina, Molly Bloom and Mrs Ramsey as one of the great female characters of literature. No question in my mind Ferrante will be on the classics shelf in two hundred years. ...more

Smiley uses King Lear as her framework for this novel. We have the ailing patriarch, a kingdom in decline and his three contesting daughters. And as ySmiley uses King Lear as her framework for this novel. We have the ailing patriarch, a kingdom in decline and his three contesting daughters. And as you’re reading you’re often wondering to what extent Smiley is going to mirror the Shakespeare plot. The plot of King Lear would be melodramatic vaudeville in the hands of a heavy handed author so Smiley is setting herself a huge challenge here.

The novel is narrated by Ginny, the eldest of the daughters. In other words Goneril, the most treacherous, spiteful and amoral of Lear’s daughters. Ginny though only shares these flaws in the most subtle of ways and it takes a while before they begin to emerge. On the surface she is self-effacing, obedient, submissive to both her father and husband. She is childless, the victim of several miscarriages and thus jealous of her sister Rose who has two girls. She is also jealous of her younger sister Caroline (Cordelia) who has escaped the farm and rural life to become a lawyer in the city. Two events throw the quiet stable long-preserved continuity of life on the farms into disarray. The father hands over the farms to his three daughters – except Caroline expresses doubts as to the wisdom of this decision and he rages and cuts her off; and the return of a neighbouring farmer’s vagabond handsome son and his championing of organic farming. (I had been watching Jess all evening. I had a third eye for Jess alone, a telescopic lens that detected every expression that crossed his face.) These events are portrayed like a calamity of sudden violent weather conditions, bringing to the surface poisons in the soil capable of destroying the most scrupulously observed methods of tilling the land. The connection between the soil and human emotion is a constant factor in the unfolding of this novel.

First thing that strikes is the poise and control of the narrative voice. There’s an awful lot of drama in this novel and with a less measured voice it might easily degenerate into soap opera-ish melodrama. But the poise and the control of the narrative voice is superb throughout. As a result what might occasionally be hard to swallow is easily digested. Then there’s Smiley’s soothsaying insight into human emotion and motive. Her greatest gift as a writer is her ability to expose the secrets of the heart, the pivotal subtleties of feeling on which lives spin. The excavating nuances of her observations were relentlessly thrilling. (“I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.”) Smiley’s also a master at creating and sustaining dramatic tension. She even writes sex well – an almost unheard of talent in my experience – “I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, could feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes.”

So why not five stars? The drama is lavished on very thickly. You get caught up in one drama – adultery - but then before any kind of resolution arrives a bigger drama is introduced – child abuse - and then an even bigger one – a plotted murder. Now and again I have to admit I wondered if it might not have been a more comprehensively thrilling and satisfying novel had Smiley kept the King Lear blueprint more of a subliminal refrain. The literally murderous nature of some emotions seemed a bit forced to me. Also I thought she overloaded the father with culpability. He was a fabulously compelling male tyrant already without tarring and feathering him with a new and truly horrendous crime. (“Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.”) But these are small misgivings in what was a fabulously exciting reading experience.

“Jess came toward Rose and me with a smile that I felt myself hook onto, the way you would hook a rope ladder over a windowsill and lower yourself out of a burning house.”

“We drove in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing "Jesus loves me," sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known.” ...more

Angel Esmeralda –1 Creation – A husband and wife are trapped on a remote island where all outgoing flights are cancelled. As ever Delillo’s prose is gAngel Esmeralda –1 Creation – A husband and wife are trapped on a remote island where all outgoing flights are cancelled. As ever Delillo’s prose is gloriously incisive and lyrical. And as usual he does a fabulous job of evoking in a new and searing light contemporary situations. In this story he’s brilliant at capturing the ennui of waiting at airports; the arresting of the narrative of a life by unseen circumstances. And showing how sometimes life happens when you’re waiting for the next chapter. A story about being compelled into a kind of backstage area of identity when the continuity machine of modern civilisation breaks down.

Some favourite quotes: “The dream of Creation that glows at the edge of the serious traveller’s search.” “This spot was so close to perfect we would not even want to tell ourselves how lucky we were, having been delivered to it. The best of new places had to be protected from our own cries of delight. We would hold the words for weeks or months, for the soft evening when a stray remark would set us to recollecting. I guess we believed, together, that the wrong voice can obliterate a landscape.” “The new snow of her breasts.”

2 Human Moments in World War Three – Two astronauts, adrift from “human moments”, are orbiting earth where World War Three has broken out. They are gathering intelligence, monitoring data and communication with the world below is largely conducted in jargon – “You are negative red on the step-function quad.” DeLillo, often cited as a kind of seer able to predict the future, is brilliant at cataloguing the damage jargon does to human interaction, how it deflects the immediacy of truthful response. “He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn’t see it anymore (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.” Then, one day, the two astronauts begin picking up wireless transmissions from sixty years ago. The two astronauts are awoken to a more nostalgic and philosophical imperative, they are returned to nature. What follows are some truly beautiful reflections on the nature of the human condition. “It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.”“To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.”

“War, among other things, is a form of longing.”

“People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city – but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was solitary would be shared.”

“There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.”

“Forget the measure of our vision, the sweep of things, the war itself, the terrible death. Forget the overarching night, the stars as static points, as mathematical fields. Forget the cosmic solitude, the upwelling awe and dread.”

“Don’t you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That’s it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you’re a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don’t you sometimes feel this?”

“We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age.”This story is DeLillo at his best.

3 The Runner. This is rather slight story about a young man is running in a park. His running is a kind of control, a kind of housekeeping: he is ordering the world around him to the rhythm of his running, he is able to take the next and the next time frame for granted. Until a car inexplicably veers off the road and comes to a sudden halt on the grass. A man jumps out of the car, steals a child who is standing close to his mother and then drives off. The runner then has a conversation with a bystander and they both seek to interpret what they have seen. Life cannot be resumed until a satisfactory explanation has been found. So it’s about those violent moments that seem to arrive out of the blue and shatter momentarily the tidy (and perhaps rather sterile) continuity of routine until they can be rationally explained. It’s a kind of parochial metaphorical insight into what happened on a grand scale on 9/11 except it was written over 20 years earlier.

4 The Ivory Acrobat.This is a story about a young American woman experiencing an earthquake while living in Athens. It explores the mirror shattering charge of a terror event, familiar DeLillo terrain, and how mass emotion infiltrates into consciousness and distorts identity. The Ivory Acrobat of the title is a cheap reproduction of a Minoan ivory figurine of a girl in the act of vaulting over a charging bull. It is given to her by Edmund, an English teacher, because he says it reminds him of her – “It’s your magical true self, mass produced”. So the story is about the threat posed by mass controlling emotion on the sanctity of self.

5 The Angel EsmeraldaAgain familiar Delillo territory – the underlying fervour of a crowd to fuse into a single consciousness. Sister Edgar is initially portrayed as a hard-boiled authoritarian, whose morality centres more on hygiene and correct use of grammar than more idealistic imperatives. Together with the younger and more idealistic Sister Gracie she performs ministrations in a dystopian part of the Bronx among “junkies who roamed at night in dead men’s Reeboks,” among “foragers and gatherers, can-redeemers, the people who yawed through subway cars with paper cups.” One young girl, Esmeralda, becomes the subject of the two nuns’ concern. But every time she is approached Esmeralda runs off. Then they hear she has been raped and thrown off the roof of a building. Soon afterwards there is a widespread talk of a miracle. The face of Esmeralda is said to appear at certain moments every night on an advertising hoarding, calling to mind the brilliant eyes of God in The Great Gatsby. Unlike Sister Gracie who now becomes the voice of reason, Sister Edgar feels a craving to see the phenomena for herself. “When the train lights hit the dimmest part of the billboard, a face appeared and it belonged to the murdered girl. A dozen women clutched their heads, they whooped and sobbed, a spirit, a godsbreath passing through the crowd.”

“If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.”

"She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture."...more

Elena Ferrante is an absolute marvel. This was utterly ravishing. How does she do it? Structurally her novels could hardly be more conservative, her sElena Ferrante is an absolute marvel. This was utterly ravishing. How does she do it? Structurally her novels could hardly be more conservative, her subject matter – the fraught friendship of two women – has been done to death. And yet you’re constantly left with the feeling that no one has ever done what she does before. Or at least no one has done it with such searing insight and freshness.

Only a handful of writers can undress and get to the heart of women as lucidly and thrillingly as Ferrante. The first hundred pages especially were quite simply a dazzling display of a writer removing all the paint and powder from a woman's face mask and showing us the naked truths beneath. Ferrante is like a kind of dream psychoanalysis. She dispels all the fog, unravels all the knots of a woman’s deepest feeling and elucidates in simple language the fount, the hidden motive. She always knows the secret as to why her women are doing what they do. She once said in an interview that her ambition was to make the facts of ordinary life gripping. She achieves this by elucidating the emotional/motivational source of many of these facts.

She also has this extraordinary talent for easing into her narrative and explaining difficult subjects without sacrificing a single beat of the fabulous driving momentum of her story. There are no divergences in this novel; every line is intrinsic to understanding Elena and Lila’s struggles to achieve identity and autonomy. For example, the domestic violence in this novel is all the more powerfully disturbing for the lack of emphasis she gives it, as if it’s no more extraordinary than a trip to the shops. It makes the domestic violence in, for example, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing seem written up and theatrical. In fact the ease with which she feeds hugely complex and pivotal experience into her narrative makes most other contemporary novelists seem a bit written up and theatrical. There’s a fleet-footed breeziness to Ferrante’s storytelling which is quite simply bewitching in its ease of assurance.

I put off reading this for ages because for some reason I thought it might be a disappointment after My Brilliant Friend. On the contrary it’s even better. ...more

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” So said Virginia Woolf and this, the forging of identity in relatio“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” So said Virginia Woolf and this, the forging of identity in relationship, is very much the theme of Elena Ferrante’s compelling novel. Elena, the narrator of the novel, is in first grade when we first meet her. She lives in a violent and impoverished working class district of Naples where kindred spirits or role models are hard to find. Certainly not her mother – “My mother did her best to make me understand that I was superfluous in her life. I wasn’t agreeable to her nor was she to me. I found her body repulsive.” Then she meets Lila. Lila is a wild child with exalted sensibility and intelligence for her age. In Lila Elena finally identifies an ideal she can aspire to. The portrait of Elena and Lila’s bond is the novel’s masterstroke. As all around them the somewhat coarse uneducated boys of the neighbourhood seek to distort and shape the girls to suit their own masculine vanity – “dissolve the margins” of separation - the two girls forge an independence of spirit that is nurtured by the inspiration they find in each other. They create a compelling and exciting inner world together, a stage on which they both are able to dramatise themselves as the heroines of their own fate. The novel is the story of their friendship and Elena’s attempts to transcend her background of thrift and mean spirited bullying.

It’s an unusual and highly distinctive novel (visually reminiscent of de Sica’s early brilliant films). Essentially because of the intensity and lucidity of Ferrante’s prose. She manages to write about the most prosaic detail with a kind of hallucinatory urgency and as such her voice hits exactly the right notes in expressing the joys and torments of adolescence when every day seems to hold moments of both pivotal humiliation and triumph, moments few adults are capable of perceiving. Thus the narrative is a constant high tension wire where the mundane relentlessly spills over into epiphany or violence. There’s a passage when Elena is writing about Lila’s prose style which would serve as the perfect eulogy of Ferrante’s prose style – “She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.” ...more

There are more laugh out loud moments in this novel than in anything I’ve read for ages. Lionel, the orphaned aspiring detective with Tourettes is anThere are more laugh out loud moments in this novel than in anything I’ve read for ages. Lionel, the orphaned aspiring detective with Tourettes is an adorable character. (Lethem helps us understand that we all have Tourettes to some extent: "Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”) The prose is consistently dazzling – often making you see the familiar with a fresh enlightening dew on it – and the plot is gripping from the word go. What’s not to like?...more

A common criticism of this book is that it’s more like four short stories than a novel. It’s true the four narratives, with a little tinkering, couldA common criticism of this book is that it’s more like four short stories than a novel. It’s true the four narratives, with a little tinkering, could stand alone as brilliant inspired stories. There’s a suspicion too that Nicole Krauss has difficulties writing novels. Only two in ten years – in stark contrast to someone like Murakami who knocks them out with what’s becoming almost a facile (and self-harming) ease. The stories are connected by a mysterious writing desk (reminiscent of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes when it’s a collection of Japanese netsuke that are used to follow bloodlines). Though the desk vanishes for great stretches of the narrative it haunts the lives of every character in these pages. Initially the desk is another victim of the Nazis. It vanishes from the home of a Jewish family in Germany. At the heart of the book is an antiques dealer who restores furniture looted by the Nazis to their Jewish owners. So the desk becomes a symbol of both home and heritage and in Great House we see how it affects the lives of a truly fabulous cast of characters. The characters are so vividly engaging that we miss them when they are gone – which is probably my only misgiving about this book. It’s difficult to keep the bigger picture in mind because of the overwhelming sweep and luminosity of each new page. It’s a bit like falling in love when the new lover utterly eclipses all who have come before. But it has to be said that there’s more brilliant writing in this book than any I’ve read this year so, on the whole, a massive thumbs up from me. And just wish Nicole Krauss was more prolific. ...more

The great tragedy of life is this then, our friends are not allowed to finish their stories.

My second reading of this book bore out my feeling the fiThe great tragedy of life is this then, our friends are not allowed to finish their stories.

My second reading of this book bore out my feeling the first time I read it. The first two hundred pages are a stunningly beautiful and moving account of love and loss and the stories hidden within stories and then, of a sudden, it’s as if Krauss handed the novel over to her distinctly less talented husband to finish off the book. She ruins it with the fourth of her narrators, the entirely preposterous whimsy of Bird who is a kind of identikit of Foer’s equally irritating cutesy cutesy little boy narrator in Extremely Loud. Bird is a mistake and the attempt to add still more madcap tomfoolery and another search for a missing person, a person who doesn’t exist, is just daft. Bird as a character is a joke that simply isn’t funny. And to make another mystery of a mystery, to create another story with the honeycomb of stories, backfires horribly so late in the novel. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that punctures so catastrophically towards the end and has left me feeling so angry and cheated.

I'd forgotten how beautiful most of this novel is. How poignantly and succinctly Krauss conveys the childhood love of two Jewish children before the Nazis arrive. How magically she recreates Leo’s memory. And how alive and full of the heart is the old man recollecting himself as a boy in the narrative. Leo is a brilliant and heartwarming depiction of old age just as Alma is a fabulous evocation of adolescence.

Krauss writes brilliantly about love, in all of its forms. She’s got a marvellous eye for epiphanies and evokes them with searing poetic simplicity. And the multi-layered form of the novel where three narrators are each telling missing parts of each other’s stories is brilliantly achieved. It also works great as a literary detective story. Almost you have to keep a list of the clues as you’re reading.

So, absolutely brilliant until Krauss’ ultimate recourse to whimsy, as if she and her husband were sharing some private joke, and which comes very close to spoiling the poignant moving emotional fabric of this novel. ...more

My favourite adventure with a novel so far this year. I loved it to bits.

In many ways attempting to review this novel is like thinking back through aMy favourite adventure with a novel so far this year. I loved it to bits.

In many ways attempting to review this novel is like thinking back through an illusionist or an escape artist’s performance of his trick and trying to work out exactly how he did it. You’re left a little baffled by the nature of the magic of the thing. Ironically for a novel inspired by magicians, there are few tricks in this novel. It features no post-modernist sleights of hand with regards structure or voice. It is straightforward storytelling at its most magical and engrossing – the plot frequently twisting with fresh surges of adrenalin. Its mesmerising power is all in the vitality and hightide imaginative reach of its story and the compelling moving humanity of its two main characters, Josef Kavalier and his American cousin Sam Clay.

The premise: Josef Kavalier’s family pay for him to emigrate from Prague to New York as the Nazis rise to power. As often was the case for Jewish families in those days the Nazi authorities kept the money but withheld the necessary papers at the last minute. Eighteen year old Joe, with the aid of his Houdini like escape artist teacher, has to smuggle himself out of occupied Prague in a coffin with Prague’s legendary Golem. He eventually makes it to Brooklyn and shares a room with his cousin Sam Clay. The way Sam initially looks after Joe and introduces him to his world and the way their bond liberates Sam is beautifully portrayed. Sam too is a great fan of Houdini and together they invent The Escapist, a superhero whose attraction to Joe is that he can vicariously use him to wage a one man war on the Nazis. Joe’s ambition now is to pay for his family to escape the Nazis. Escape is always the name of the game in this novel. (Sam has a secret he is trying to escape from.) There’s barely a single female character in this novel for 200 pages. And then Rosa Saks arrives…

The comic book theme of Kavalier & Clay has put me off reading this for years. I remember a paperback copy was knocking about in my first flat in Florence and despite the difficulty of getting hold of novels in English I still never felt inclined to read it. Comic books have no more relevance to my life than darts or bingo. I’ve never been anywhere near a film which features a costumed hero in a mask and lurid tights. Therefore I was far from sure I would enjoy this novel.

Kavalier & Clay, like so many other novels, attempts to get at the quintessence of the American dream and it does a decent job, chronicling so many of the characteristics of American cultural and political life between 1939 and the 1950s. But the real triumph of this novel is its dramatization of intimate worlds, of friendship, of sexual love, of parenting, of private obsessions and yearnings, and of the creative process - the relationship between artist and inspiration, the process and the exuberance of artistic creation, is one of its most exciting achievements. We also see the relationship between artist and the corporate world, and between artist and censorship too.

The friendship between Joe and Sam is a joy to read from start to finish, one of the most moving accounts of synergistic liberating companionship I’ve ever read. Some of Joe’s actions are questionable but because Sammy always forgives him so do we. Sammy is a kind of moral touchstone in this novel. And, as his surname suggests, he’s also the novel’s Golem, the catalyst for all the novel’s magic. It’s also him who expresses our own scepticism about comic books as high art - though in the end Chabon makes a great case for the important cultural significance of the comic book.

This is one of those novels when you sense that half the trick of writing a rich compelling novel is for the author to feel a consuming love for his characters and get to the heart of them. Chabon clearly loves his characters and this love is highly contagious. If you haven’t already read it, give it a try. It’s heartwarming and exciting and magical and utterly engrossing. ...more

It’s astounding this masterpiece of a book was written in 1934 because even now I can think of only one other book of biographical literature that isIt’s astounding this masterpiece of a book was written in 1934 because even now I can think of only one other book of biographical literature that is so strikingly ground-breaking, so thrillingly compelling in its method of composition – Laurent Binet’s investigation of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich HHhH. There are similarities between the two books – most obviously how both authors forge an intimacy with their reader by narrating not only personal feelings about their subject but also making a kind of detective story of how they sought and found the necessary source material. It’s like we’re taken inside the process of writing biography.

There’s no question Symons lucked out with his subject. Frederick Rolfe, also calling himself Baron Corvo, is like a fantastic character from Nabokov. His comic possibilities almost infinite. Rolfe was a failed painter, photographer, musician and priest before becoming a writer. He experienced his troubles and injustices, actual, threatened or imagined, as more relentless, taxing and dramatic than those of other people. Symons’ interest in him begins when a friend lends him one of Rolfe’s novels, Hadrian the Seventh. Symons is so bewitched by the novel that he wants to find out more about its author.

Rolfe’s most passionate ambition was to become a Catholic priest. When he was thrown out of the Scots College in Rome due to “erratic behaviour” he never really recovered from his sense of injustice (toward the end of his life, he signed himself Fr. Rolfe, hoping to be mistaken for a priest) and the persecution complex that follows is without question his most compelling and defining trait. He has the persecution complex to end all persecution complexes. In his novel Hadrian the Seventh he exacts his revenge by appointing himself as Pope and slandering all his enemies, a method of revenge he will employ in all his future fiction. Basically if you get on the wrong side of Rolfe you’re going to be lampooned with brilliant flourishes of venomous wit in his next novel! Symons has an early stroke of luck when he procures a series of magazine articles in which a writer vents an incredibly detailed account of Rolfe’s misdemeanours while living in Aberdeen.

Rolfe never has any money and is therefore dependent on patrons. But he is also convinced of his genius and so resentful that the world doesn’t provide him with a living. This grievance he will always take out on his benefactors. No matter how promisingly every new relationship begins you just know it’s only a matter of time before his paranoia kicks in and his vituperative tongue will begin lashing out. Of his many eccentricities one that always brings him into conflict with publishers is his refusal to use conventional spelling. There are many examples of this stubbornness in him, a couple that spring to mind being an insistence on spelling public publick and Cyprus Zyprus. No way will he stand down, even if it means scuppering the deal and returning to extreme poverty.

Not that Rolfe consists only of comic flaws. He clearly has a rare insight into the medieval mind and a deep insightful feeling for Italian history – one of his books is a biography of the Borgias. He is also clearly charming when he wants to be. He ends his life in Venice, often reduced to sleeping on a boat and going without food for days on end.

Symons’ final quest is to find Rolfe’s missing manuscripts, always ornately handwritten on expensive paper and in various coloured inks, as few of his books were published in his lifetime. Symons’ genuine love for Rolfe’s writing means there’s always a tender, sympathetic side to his portrait of Rolfe. Symons sees the comic charlatan in Rolfe but, thanks to his generosity of imagination he also sees genius and it’s this delicately balanced perspective that makes this such a riveting, hysterically funny and moving book. It’s also an awesome achievement how much material Symons managed to gather given that Rolfe was no more of a public figure than you or I at the time he set out on his quest. Rolfe works his consuming charm on Symons just as he bewitched all his patrons. But Symons was the only one he is unable to turn on and slander. And as a result finally a patron is free to help Rolfe get the recognition he deserves.

Shirley Hazard is without question a first rate wordsmith; she can write beautiful sentences and string them together into an exhilarating music. SheShirley Hazard is without question a first rate wordsmith; she can write beautiful sentences and string them together into an exhilarating music. She does it consistently. But she seems incapable of writing a truly first rate novel. The Great Fire nearly made it but failed ultimately for me because of Hazard’s obfuscating and belittling worship of romantic love. The central relationship in that novel was a fairy story. Hazard is at her best when her characters are figuratively standing beneath a window in the pouring rain. But it’s a sensibility that belongs to a bygone era. And as such can often come across as something sentimental we still feel affection for but have grown out of. It’s as if she needs to do what Fitzgerald did in Gatsby – stand outside his own romanticism, project it elsewhere and see it for what it really is, a sustained act of heightened imagination that ultimately is an illusion. The Transit of Venus is a novel about affairs of the heart. Many of them illicit; or at least, outside matrimony. Characters are only really alive when the heart is engaged and pumping. It reminded me a lot of Rosamond Lehman’s the Echoing Grove – the theme of two sisters, one rebellious, the other more willing to compromise to the dictates of domesticity and the romantic lyrical nature of the novel’s sensibility. Lehman though did a much better job of examining the backstage realms of domesticity without belittling it as Hazard often does. Hazard isn’t interested in her domesticated female until she’s contemplating adultery. She isn’t really interested in anyone unless they’re about to step out into a storm. Also, stylistically this novel is a nightmare for the first fifty pages. So tangled and cryptic are her sentences that you have to read each one twice – which would be fine if it was worth the effort, but too often it isn’t. It reminded me of both late Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen –the trick-or-treat facemasking of the opaque overly wrought prose. The first fifty or so pages are virtually unreadable. Until, it appears, Hazard begins to enjoy her characters and her story and relaxes. As I said there’s much to admire in the writing itself but as a novel there was too much that jarred for me – her attempts to politicise the text for example when one of her triumphs is to transcend era: her novels always have an encompassing timeless drift - to truly take it to my heart. ...more

“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his mod“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

I’m a sucker for beautiful writing and this is a very beautifully written novel. Doerr always has full imaginative command of his detail and, even if occasionally he feeds too much protein into his sentences, is thus able to evoke his images searingly and poignantly. The novel is a visual delight which is an especially brilliant achievement when you consider he’s often writing about blindness. Doerr’s poetic sentence writing often transfigures the familiar, allowing us to see the natural world afresh. His prose strips us of our own blindness to the beauty in the commonplace. The natural world pervades this novel like a kind of scripture. The goodies are aligned to the natural world; the baddies see it as little more than resources for furthering ambition. This being one of the many fairy tale motifs the novel dramatises. Because it can be read as a fairy tale. There’s a magical stone in the custodianship of Marie Laure’s father, a kind of Wizard (Etienne’s brother who transmits stories over the radio which Werner and his sister listen to as children) and a very clear unwavering distinction between the good guys and the baddies with few grey areas. The innocents are pure. The corrupted are beyond help.

All the Light tells the story of Marie Laure who is blind (To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air) and lives in Paris with her father (an idealised character in keeping with the fairy tale subtext of this novel), a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. There, hidden in its vaults for the past 200 years, is an accursed gem, a greyish-blue sea diamond with a red hue at its centre: the Sea of Flame. When war comes Marie Laure and her father will become guardians of this stone. The other central character is Werner. Werner and his sister Jutta are orphans in the German mining town of Zollverein, near Essen in the Ruhr valley, heartland of the Nazi war industry. Werner has a gift of mending things and is especially attracted to radios. At night he and Jutta listen to an enigmatic French man telling stories for children over the radio – “a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.” As straightforward storytelling this novel is ravishing. I liked the short chapters and the flashing back and forwards in time. It reminded me of David Mitchell in its disregard for the perimeters between literary and commercial fiction. Doerr, like Mitchell, romps back and forth between the two camps with great poise and ease.

I’m not quite sure what Dave Eggers means when he says Doerr “sets a new standard for what storytelling can do” because there’s nothing groundbreaking about this novel. Like I said it’s straightforward brilliant storytelling. On one occasion Doerr uses a cheap trick, introducing a new POV to crank up tension (an informer who lives near Marie Laure) and then discarding the POV for the rest of the novel but on the whole the artistry of this novel was spellbinding. One of the novel’s themes is guardianship, executed especially well with Werner’s protective but ultimately impotent feelings towards the dreamy Frederick at the bullyboy Nazi college, but shown as a constant facet of the novel’s every relationship. Everyone is guarding some precinct, some stone or calling of the heart. How, above all else, we are all guardians of our own flame which, in the novel, is often seen as our relation to how we use our time and best dramatised through Marie Laure’s great-uncle, the shellshocked Etienne who after WW1 became agoraphobic and never leaves his house until circumstances force him out. This idea is also expressed by Werner – “He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”

Transmitters/transmission is another constant theme. The diamond transmits a curse, coal transmits energy, light transmits codes and of course the radio transmits a channel through which Marie Laure and Werner first connect and establish their elective affinity. Doerr creates a world we’re all blind to, a world pulsing with invisible transmitting circuitry. So what began as a clever stroke of emotional manipulation – the positing of a blind girl at the heart of the novel – becomes a tour de force of thematic choreography.

Map-making is another theme. Etienne’s broadcasts create a map that unites Werner and Marie Laure. Marie’s father builds her a miniature scaled model of her Paris neighbourhood and then, when they move, a miniature model of Saint-Malo in order that she may feel her way through a perfect replica of her surroundings. Werner is mapping out enemy transmitters during the war. Once again Doerr is exploring the invisible grid that maps out our lives, the light we cannot see.

The bitchiness of Carmen Callil’s review in the Guardian was astonishing. Rarely do fellow writers publically ridicule each other in public. Just the opposite. There seems to be a you-pat-my-back-and-I’ll-pat-yours attitude to reviewing so you have to wonder why her review seemed so personally malicious. Often the reviews seemed to have this novel down as a brilliant page-turner but not great literature. I’ve been wondering about this. I adored reading this novel and then perhaps, a day after finishing it, felt maybe I had been somehow tricked into liking it better than it deserves. Does Doerr lack a little subtlety in his emotional manipulation of the reader? If you write a novel about a blind girl with an adoring ideal father and an orphan boy who protects his younger sister you’re obviously going to almost immediately command a great deal of sympathy for your characters. These are the innocents of fairy stories. Also the stalker von Rompel who Doerr makes no attempt to portray as anything but pantomime villain. But all these motifs belong to the fairy story aspect of this novel and within that context are managed well I think. It’s also been said Doerr doesn’t deal with Nazism very convincingly. Is that a valid criticism? The English patient is a WW2 novel and it could be said that doesn’t deal with Nazism very well either. Doesn’t prevent it from being a brilliant thought-provoking novel.

“Impossibly, the static coalesces into music. Volkheimer's eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking. They reach the edge of a frozen pond, where a pine grows as tall as a cathedral. His great-grandfather goes to his knees like a penitent, fits the saw into a groove in the bark, and begins to cut.” ...more

I recently read Doctor Zhivago which Nabokov hated. You could say these two books are the antithesis of each other. Zhivago strives to depict a poeticI recently read Doctor Zhivago which Nabokov hated. You could say these two books are the antithesis of each other. Zhivago strives to depict a poetic vision of real life on a huge canvas and find meaning therein; Pnin is self-pleasuring art for art’s sake on a tiny canvas. Nabokov isn’t remotely interested in “real life” or deep meaning or huge canvases. He passes over the Russian Revolution in a couple of sentences whereas a description of a room that will only feature once in the entire novel is likely to receive an entire long paragraph. Wisdom doesn’t interest him much either except as a reliable source of caustic mockery. Psychotherapy is one of his targets in Pnin. Just as he mocks a lot of the devices favoured by novelists. There are two instances in this novel of Nabokov cleverly creating a great deal of sympathy for Pnin and in both he takes away our sympathy as soon as he’s got it. These involve Pnin catching the wrong train to an important lecture he’s due to give (he makes it there on time regardless) and of Pnin receiving a cherished bowl from his son which he believes he has destroyed when he lets slip a pair of nutcrackers into the soapy washing up water (turns out to be a worthless glass he’s broken). Pnin is constantly being misled by subjective interpretations of objective reality but it doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t do him any real harm. There’s a sense Nabokov thinks of everything as a storm in a teacup, even the Russian revolution and Hitler’s war, from both of which Pnin emerges unscathed as if they’re of little more importance than a thunderstorm. If you’re God there’s a lot of truth in this point of view and Nabokov can come across as believing himself to be a deity of sorts.

I’ve just read some of the negative reviews of this and the word “boring” crops up a lot. And depending on the page you’re on Pnin is either brilliant or, as these people say, can be a bit boring. That is to say it’s boring if you’re not a great fan of elaborate description of furniture, landscape or physiognomy. There is a lot of wordsmithery spent on ephemera. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that so swiftly and frequently transited me from joy to boredom. There’s one of the best comic scenes in literature involving the hapless Russian professor, a squirrel and a water fountain. It’s comic genius but on anything but a superficial level it’s also meaningless, like one of those cute animal YouTube videos. That one scene maybe sums up this novel better than any review could – the slightly hollow interior behind the brilliant surface.

All in all Pnin is a pale understudy to Pale Fire in which he finds a dazzling form to poke fun at his targets here, exile into a foreign culture and academia. ...more

I always believed War and Peace was one of my three favourite novels. Now, after reading it a second time, I wouldn't include it in my favourite 30. WI always believed War and Peace was one of my three favourite novels. Now, after reading it a second time, I wouldn't include it in my favourite 30. Without question, to my mind, Anna Karenina is the better novel.

On the positive side, it's astonishing how well Tolstoy knows all his characters and how vibrantly he brings them alive on the page. There's so much of life in this book. It's a marvel how brilliantly he dramatizes many of life's key emotions. The first four hundred or so pages are a joy to read. But then there's the war. And man, is he boring on the war. At one point I couldn't help imagining him on a soapbox at Hyde Park corner (perhaps alongside DH Lawrence, another brilliant writer who once he got an idea in his head relentlessly bludgeoned you with it). Towards the end it's almost as if his ambition is to make each new page even more unreadable than the previous one. It was like he become the drunken fixated bore at what previously seemed a promising dinner party.

I think one could make a strong case for only reading half this novel. But, in that case, is it really a great novel?...more

An utterly compelling read about Vera Atkins and the female SOE agents she helped send to France. Especially moving is her relentless attempt at the eAn utterly compelling read about Vera Atkins and the female SOE agents she helped send to France. Especially moving is her relentless attempt at the end of the war to discover what happened to those agents who had vanished from all official records. At this point the book becomes a gripping detective story. There's also the mystery of Vera herself, a fascinating woman who gave so little of herself away and destroyed many of her documents. So this fabulously well written and researched book contains mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. If you want a true idea of what these brave women went through I'd definitely recommend this rather than much of the romanticised and patronising fiction written on the subject. ...more